The Great Melt: Accounts from the Frontline of Climate Change

By Alister Doyle

The time for action is now.

The fate of the world's coasts rests on a knife edge as global warming melts ice sheets and glaciers from the Alps to the Andes. The choices we make now will determine whether oceans rise by a coast-swamping 1 meter by 2100 or whether we can save our coastal communities.

From the glaciers of Antarctica and the high Andes, to the small island states of the Pacific and the coastal cities of Miami, New York, Venice and Rotterdam – Alister Doyle tracks the thaw that threatens life as we know it, shining a light on the most vulnerable people at the shoreline who are already moving inland, on the scientists puzzling about what is going on, and on the ideas about how to limit the damage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flint
• Release date: Oct 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780750999137

Alister Doyle

Alister Doyle is an award-winning journalist who has covered climate change for almost two decades. He has reported from about 50 nations in six continents, including two trips to Antarctica and numerous visits to the Arctic, and was the first Environment Correspondent for Reuters, from 2004-19. He was also a lead writer for Reuters’ award-winning Project Greenland in 2018 and wrote the UN report, “The Heat is On” (2019). He blends his journalistic instincts with compelling storytelling and powerful human stories.

Book preview

1

IN ANTARCTICA, THE GIANT STIRS

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around:

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

Like noises in a swound!

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834)

Around the fringes of Antarctica, by far the biggest store of ice on the planet, glaciers are showing signs of an ‘irreversible’ melt that could swamp the world’s coasts. The focus of research is on a huge ‘doomsday glacier’, the Thwaites, after the break-up of ice shelves, including the Wilkins, to the north. Scientists, and other staff including cooks, pilots and electricians, are devoting their careers to understanding a continent that could be a frozen ‘time bomb’ for sea level rise.

A BUZZER SOUNDS IN THE tiny red plane as it swoops down to land on the Wilkins Ice Shelf off Antarctica, unnerving the first – and only – visitors to a part of the world that has since vanished off the map in a chaos of icebergs.

Seals lolling on the sea ice look up as we pass above them, mystified by the whirr of what is almost certainly the only thing they’ve ever seen flying apart from birds. ‘Remote’ hardly captures how far this white slab of ice is from civilisation – the nearest town is Punta Arenas in Chile more than 2,000km to the north, beyond the stormy Southern Ocean.

As the alarm sounds, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and we two reporters aboard brace for the worst: I grip the metal frames of the bare-bones seat of the Twin Otter plane, equipped with skis as well as wheels, enabling it to land and take off almost anywhere, sliding over ice or bumping on a dirt runway.

We’ve flown 300km over the jagged mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula (one of the fastest-warming places on Earth), which snakes up towards South America, and then out over the collapsing Wilkins Ice Shelf. Here, ice chunks bigger than city blocks lie entombed in a frozen sea.

There are no landing strips, just endless white. And the unexpected buzzer makes things a lot worse. Why did my Thomson Reuters video colleague Stuart McDill, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, and I accept this assignment? I look over at Canadian pilot Steve King, luckily he’s not freaking out and looks reassuringly concentrated despite the alarm. A second or two after the buzzer sounds, the skis touch down gently on flat, slushy snow and ice and the plane slithers to a halt. He turns off the twin propellers, clicks a few buttons on the dashboard above his head and climbs out of the plane in his red jumpsuit and blinks into the hazy sunshine.

Oh, didn’t I tell you beforehand about the buzzer? he chirpily asks as we passengers clamber down the ladder onto the bright ice. I’m still shaky when he tells us the alarm just before landing is a badge of honour for polar pilots – a warning that the plane has slowed to stall speed of about 105km per hour – meaning it is going to fall out of the sky. That sounds a daft goal for a pilot, but there is a safety logic. The sluggish speed meant the plane would travel a minimum distance before coming to a halt, reducing risks that it might fall into a hidden crevasse, the main worry for landing on unknown ice and snow. So, for King, the buzzer going off just as we landed was a stroke of aviation magic.

As the propellors spin to a stop, the silence takes over on a near-windless day by the Southern Ocean. No one has ever been to this spot before – and no one will ever come back. No one knew at the time in January 2009, but this part of the ice shelf was weeks away from breaking up for good in April into massive icebergs, probably after being in place for thousands of years. Now the region is open water in the brief Antarctic summers.

The scientists have come here because ice shelves, vast tongues of ice floating on the sea around much of Antarctica, hold huge clues to predicting sea level rise that threatens places from New York to Buenos Aires and coastlines from Pacific islands to Bangladesh. When we visit, the Wilkins Ice Shelf covers an area about the size of Jamaica.

McDill and I visited the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Base for two weeks, a rare insight not only into the science but also the human side of life underpinning research in Antarctica. That landing was a fairly routine day for staff in a place where scientists expose themselves to risks – ranging from engine failures to crevasses – to help understand the world’s biggest deep freeze.

Overall, Antarctica is the size of the US and Mexico combined and contains enough ice to raise world sea levels by about 58 metres if it ever all melted.1 Scientists say there are more signs that Antarctica is thawing at the edges and, most alarmingly, that an ‘irreversible’ melt might already be under way.

Antarctica is divided into two main parts, East and West, each with its own risks. East Antarctica, the giant taking up most of the continent, has the coldest and most stable ice sheet, locking up more than 90 per cent of the ice. West Antarctica, which includes the Antarctic Peninsula and the Wilkins Ice Shelf, is the most vulnerable to a thaw.

A decade ago, the Wilkins was the focus of research but during the 2020s, scientists have shifted attention south, to the even more remote region of the Thwaites glacier. It’s sometimes called the ‘doomsday glacier’, the widest glacier on earth at 120km across where it meets the ocean. The worry is that a collapse of the Thwaites could be the first domino to fall on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, unleashing a flow of ice pent up inland that could lead to sea level rise of 3.3 metres2 over centuries, or millennia. And the risks are growing – a bit like on our plane, the scientific alarm buzzer is ever shriller.

As previously noted, the UN’s expert group, the IPCC, said in August 20213 that global sea levels are likely to rise by up to about a metre this century if man-made greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. The report includes dire warnings about the thaw under way in Greenland and Antarctica. Even if global warming is limited to the goals of Paris Agreement, it says there is limited evidence that the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets will be lost almost completely and irreversibly over multiple millennia. Irreversible is, of course, planet changing.

On the worst trajectory of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels are likely to rise by between about two and seven metres by 2300, it said. That is above the upper bound of 5.4 metres considered in a 2019 report, based on a slightly different scenario. Radical action now to limit greenhouse gas emissions and promote a more sustainable economy could curb the rise in sea levels, in the best case, to less than a metre by 2300, the 2021 report says. But scientists are unable to predict with any degree of precision what will happen to ice sheets in a warming world. All the IPCC scenarios for rising oceans have huge ranges, especially beyond the next few decades.4 Much of the increased risk seen by the IPCC this century is driven by Antarctica – every extra centimetre of meltwater makes floods more frequent in low-lying regions where tens of millions of people live. At the other end of the planet, Greenland is also pouring water into the ocean, threatening coasts and cities.

Not keeping to the Paris climate agreement really commits cities to the sea, climate scientist Anders Levermann tells me. And in 2300 sea level rise is not done. It’s going to continue. He says that the world is still far from understanding the risks of what is happening in Antarctica. There may still be ‘unknown unknowns’ – unexpected processes scientists have yet to imagine – about ice sheets.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, governments promised to limit the rise in average global temperatures to well below 2°C above pre-industrial times while pursuing efforts for a 1.5°C maximum, but even such rises in temperatures could be the tripwire for a meltdown of ice sheets.

Sea levels are condemned to rise in the very long term even if governments meet the Paris targets, partly because of instabilities in Greenland and Antarctica, the IPCC said in 2021.5 Over the next 2,000 years, global mean sea level will rise by about 2 to 3 metres if warming is limited to 1.5°C, the IPCC said, and by 2–6 metres with 2°C of warming.6 Bear in mind that temperatures are already up about 1.2°C.

David Vaughan, Director of Science at the British Antarctic Survey who led our flight to the Wilkins, says research is likely to stay in West Antarctica, especially to understand warmer ocean waters that are gnawing away at the ice from below. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet – Thwaites, Pine island and a few other small glaciers – is where we should be working. They are the biggest uncertainty about sea level rise. I can’t see that focus changing in the next few years, he told me in 2021.

He laughs when we reminisce over that day on the Wilkins – especially the risky timing of landing on a place that turned out to be about to disappear off the map.

After getting out of the Twin Otter plane on the Wilkins, Vaughan beams and starts jumping up and down on the slushy snow and ice, dancing for joy like a kid. This is amazing! he exults, a switch from the eminent professor we’ve got to know back at the scientific base. My colleague McDill jokes that it may be unwise to jump up and down on a collapsing ice shelf. But Vaughan, who has spent most of the flight studying the shattered ice out of the window, knows we’re no more than ants on a skyscraper.

On the flight from the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Base we’ve even passed over the eponymous Vaughan Inlet on the Antarctic Peninsula – the continent is so little known that places are sometimes named after people who are working here today. The Vaughan Inlet, honouring David’s work on the break-up of Antarctica’s ice, is near a place called Shiver Point.

From the sky, the Wilkins looks like a giant has angrily emptied out a jigsaw puzzle, his brain numbed by the jumble of white and bluish pieces, to create a senseless clutter. Or it’s like someone has dropped a massive wedding cake and shattered icing is everywhere. There’s no way of easily gauging the scale, there are no buildings or trees to give a sense of size in Antarctica, in fact there are only a few colours: black rocks, white ice and blue sky and water. Many of the chunks of ice we see are bigger than the Empire State building in New York or the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, lying on their sides. The only sense of perspective when we fly low has come from the small black dots on the sea ice – up closer we see they are seals in the sunshine on a windless day, craning their necks.

Vaughan explains to us that glaciers are giant rivers of ice, built up from snowfall. In permanently frozen regions like most of Antarctica, fresh snow weighs down on older layers below, crushing snowflakes and squeezing out air to form solid ice that becomes a glacier. Gravity draws the glacier downhill towards the sea – often meandering like a slow-motion river or icy serpent. When the glacier reaches the sea, it can break up or, in some cases, keep flowing outwards to form a tongue of ice floating on the water – an ice shelf like the Wilkins that can be hundreds of metres thick. At the outer edge of ice shelves, chunks eventually snap off into the sea as icebergs. It’s all a natural process, but global warming is accelerating the slide. The Wilkins Ice Shelf juts about 20 metres above the sea with the rest under water – like an iceberg with only the tip showing.

The increasing worry among Antarctic scientists is that ice shelves act as natural brakes that hold back large amounts of ice inland, slowing the flow of the ice sheets towards the ocean. The Wilkins holds back ice equivalent to about 1cm of sea level rise if it all melted, tiny compared to the Thwaites.

Glaciologists have come up with an array of imaginative analogies to explain what’s going on with ice shelves. In the worst case, some glaciologists fear Antarctica’s ice, which is 4,776 metres deep at its thickest point,7 is like a gigantic wine bottle lying on its side, with the ice shelves acting as the cork. When the cork fits tight, everything’s fine. Remove the cork, however, and almost immediately the whole bottle starts to gurgle out.

Others compare Antarctica to a Gothic cathedral – a building whose weight squeezes the walls outwards and needs extra support from the sides, or flying buttresses, to prevent collapse. Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, told a US Congressional committee in 2019:8 Some early Gothic cathedrals suffered from the ‘spreading-pile’ problem, in which the sides tended to bulge out while the roof sagged down, with potentially unpleasant consequences. The beautiful solution was the flying buttress, which transfers some of the spreading tendency to the strong earth beyond the cathedral. Ice sheets also have ‘flying buttresses’, called ice shelves.

Less poetically, he and others also compare the Antarctic ice to a lump of pancake batter – when it’s cold, it’s a stable lump. Heat it in a frying pan and it will quickly splay out.

Among other explanations, the Earth Institute at Columbia University says that land-bound glaciers behind ice shelves are like people jostling for space. Glaciers are constantly pushing seaward. But because many shelves are largely confined within expansive bays and gulfs, they are compressed from the sides and slow the glaciers’ march – somewhat like a person in a narrow hallway bracing their arms against the walls to slow someone trying to push past them.9

Ice shelves themselves don’t add to sea level rise when they break up – they are already part of the ocean floating on the water. But it is their effect in releasing the pent-up ice behind them that can make a massive difference. Since Antarctica’s ice is so vast, even small changes around the edges need to be monitored because they can affect coasts around the world. Relatively speaking, the ice here dwarfs mountain glaciers from the Andes to the Himalayas. In addition, about 75 per cent of Antarctica’s coast has ice shelves10 extending offshore – the largest, the Ronne-Filchner, covers an area a bit smaller than Spain. Other large shelves are Ross and McMurdo. So that’s why we flew to the Wilkins for a first-hand view.

In the early 1990s, the Wilkins Ice Shelf covered about 17,400 sq km, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.11 At the time of our visit, it’s shrunk to 10,300 sq km, after repeated collapses in a warming world. Large parts of eight other smaller shelves around the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula have already broken up.

By the time we are there on the Wilkins, the British Antarctic Survey reckons that a total of 25,000 sq km of ice shelf has been lost from around the Antarctic Peninsula since the 1950s. That lost area is bigger than Israel or roughly the same size as the US state of Vermont.

It’s January 2009 and just past midsummer in the southern hemisphere – the spot we’ve just landed on is a 40km long ‘ice bridge’ of the Wilkins Ice Shelf connecting mainland Antarctica to Charcot Island offshore to the west. Break-ups of the shelf mean this ice bridge is about 500 metres wide in 2009 at the narrowest, down from tens of kilometres in the early 1990s. In satellite pictures at the time, the Wilkins ice bridge looked like a jagged sliver from Charcot Island pinning the bulk of the ice shelf against the coast of Antarctica. A year earlier, in 2008, the British Antarctic Survey flew down here, without landing, and took dramatic pictures of the thinning ice bridge that were broadcast worldwide. It concluded that the Wilkins was hanging by a thread.12

My colleague McDill sets up his tripod and camera on the ice and Vaughan steps up. We’ve come to the Wilkins Ice Shelf to see its final death throes, Vaughan says. It really could go at any minute. After the 2008 British Antarctic Survey flight, miraculously we’ve come back a summer later and it’s still here. If it was hanging by a thread last year, it’s hanging by a filament this year.

He tells everyone that we shouldn’t linger – and correctly predicts that the shelf is likely to break up in coming weeks or months. As part of the trip, Vaughan and colleagues slot together what becomes a 4-metre pole topped by a GPS satellite transmitter to be stuck into the ice for a Dutch-led experiment to detect movements in the shelf. It will give hints to movements that could herald a collapse, caused by winds or ocean currents. Having assembled the pole, Vaughan pulls out a tiny strip of paper that will connect the battery and activate the GPS. He does so and the GPS pole starts bleeping.

Good, it seems to be working. But after about a minute, the bleeps abruptly stop and there’s no other sign of life from the pole. This starts a debate among the scientists: yes, it’s probably working perfectly and was programmed to bleep only for a few seconds to show it was okay. But what if the battery has slipped out of place, or the GPS is broken and this part of the trip is in vain? No one knows – there are no written instructions, and no mobile phone, satellite phone or radio connection to check with the Dutch scientists back at the Rothera Base 300km away. The scientists do the usual things when something like a TV remote control doesn’t work back home – shake it, take the battery out and put it in again, knock it a couple of times. It doesn’t make a difference. The beeps don’t resume. Vaughan rightly concludes that it’s working – endless bleeping would be a pointless waste of energy with only the odd passing Antarctic skua – an often-aggressive, seagull-sized brown bird – likely ever to hear it.

While on the ice, King, the pilot, advises passengers to stay near the plane – walking anywhere is a risk because there might be treacherous fissures.

McDill does a memorable piece to camera about landing in a spot never visited before and we all take photos to capture the moment. Afterwards, however, they look unremarkable – the background is just a flat, continuous white of snow beneath a blue sky mottled with clouds, all as if taken on an empty plain – no ice cliffs, no sea, no drama.

King shepherds everyone back aboard, again warning that you never know when this place might shatter. We take off and he flies nerve-janglingly low, skimming over the frozen sea to give McDill a view for taking video – sometimes even below the flat top of the ice shelf, which is only about 20 metres above the ocean. And a bit later, flying along a several kilometre-long crack between two massive chunks of the ice shelf, the wings seem to be almost touching the sides.

McDill films from the co-pilot’s seat beside King – I’m impressed his nerves are steady enough. Viewing it later, scientists say it’s like the Star Wars movie A New Hope when Luke Skywalker skims low above the Death Star.

Just another day cheatin’ death, King remarks wryly at one point.

The Twin Otter, a Canadian-built de Havilland plane, is a workhorse in Antarctica. With a wingspan of about 20 metres and an ability to accelerate and take off within about 400 metres, every kilo counts. No one takes flying lightly – danger is everywhere in Antarctica.

Among other ice shelves that have broken up on the Antarctic Peninsula are the George VI – named after the late British King and father of Queen Elizabeth – or the Prince Gustav, named after the man who became king of Sweden in 1907. Antarctica’s names, a snapshot of history in the early twentieth century, underscore the isolation of the continent, and the difficulty of knowing how it might melt.

The continent was sighted13 in 1820, by Russian, British and American expeditions, meaning many names date from around then, with a mixture of royalty and explorers and competing claims – Argentina, Britain and Chile all have overlapping stakes to territory on the Antarctic Peninsula, ‘frozen’ under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty which says the continent belongs to no one. An era of exploration followed the early whaling pioneers. Norwegian Roald Amundsen was first to reach the South Pole in December 1911, a month before Briton Robert Falcon Scott and four companions. Scott and his men, trapped for days in a tent in a blizzard and suffering from hunger, exhaustion and frostbite, died on the return journey.

The Wilkins itself is named after Australian George Hubert Wilkins, an early Antarctic aviator and explorer of both poles. A year after he died, aged 70 in 1958, the US Navy scattered his ashes at the North Pole.

The problem for understanding the risks is that Antarctica’s thaw is seen by so few. It’s hard to grasp one of the most alarming effects of man-made global warming caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions from cars, factories and power plants when it is thousands of kilometres away. Similarly, the historic nature and the sense of such giant markers in the landscape being immutable makes the concept of change hard to fathom.

Ice shelves have indeed been around a long time. A study of ocean sediments beneath one of the collapsed Larsen ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, for instance, found no recent traces in the seabed of algae – tiny marine plants – that require sunlight to grow. That indicated that the ice had been in place, blocking sunlight, for at least 10,000 years. Those Larsen shelves are named after a Norwegian whaler who sailed perilously far south in the late nineteenth